Research

Politicians, pundits, and ordinary citizens frequently argue that private money has an outsized influence on U.S. politics. Yet research on the effect of money on politicians' behavior finds limited effects, especially on voting behavior. I construct a formal model to show that these limited effects may be an artifact of the institutional powers of agenda setters in Congress, and the strategic nature of the data generating process. The model predicts that under general conditions, vote buying against proposals can occur with no vote held, and that vote buying is most likely when uncertainty is high, the interest group and agenda setter are extreme, and the pivotal legislator is moderate. I argue that these conditions held during the 2021 negotiations over the Build Back Better Act. Using a synthetic control design, I test whether the swing voters in the Senate received more campaign contributions than they would have otherwise, finding evidence consistent with the model.

Legislative bargaining often unfolds under pressure from organized interests, yet most formal models of agenda setting abstract away from this influence. I develop a formal model in which an interest group can transfer resources to legislators in exchange for their votes. The agenda setter therefore adjusts proposals either to take advantage of support from the group or to preempt opposition. The analysis yields three results. First, when the proposer and group are aligned, vote buying can occur in equilibrium, and social welfare is weakly lower than the baseline with no group. Second, when they are misaligned, vote buying never occurs, and welfare effects are ambiguous. Third, alignment between the proposer and the group generally produces minimal winning coalitions, while misalignment generates incentives for supermajorities. An empirical analysis of U.S. House roll calls is consistent with these predictions: bills aligned with organized business interests tend to pass with narrower margins than misaligned legislation.

Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo, and Snyder (2003) famously argue that most money in politics is motivated by consumption rather than investment, citing evidence that campaign contributions have little effect on legislators' voting behavior. We revisit this influential claim using updated data and new theoretical tools. First, we show that a comparable analysis using more recent data reveals a modest but statistically significant relationship between contributions and vote choice. Second, we use a formal model of vote buying with an endogenous agenda to demonstrate that standard empirical approaches may systematically underestimate the effects of contributions. Third, we show that the challenge of inference becomes even more difficult when contributions are driven by a mix of expressive and instrumental motives. Finally, we review theoretical arguments that help explain why contributions might appear low even when they reflect attempts to influence policy. Together, these findings suggest that the influence of organized interests may be more substantial, and more difficult to detect, than early analyses implied.

Billions of dollars are spent lobbying the federal government each year, yet the effects of regulating this activity remain poorly understood. I develop a formal model to examine one such intervention: a cap on lobbying expenditures. In the model, expenditures serve purely as costly signals, or "burning money," used to convey a lobbyist’s intensity of preference. Lobbyists represent constituencies with known ideal points but hold private information about their sensitivity to policy deviations. A policymaker, uncertain about these types, chooses a policy that maximizes the sum of the lobbyists’ utilities. I show that in the absence of regulation, lobbyists can fully reveal their type in equilibrium. Surprisingly, imposing an exogenous expenditure cap increases the lobbyists’ ex-ante expected utility by reducing the informativeness of low spending. These findings suggest that lobbying regulations can improve outcomes for lobbyists on average, even when they restrict inefficient forms of influence.